The Linux Foundation has announced the formation of the Enabling Linux in Safety Applications (ELISA) project to create tools and processes for companies to use to build and certify safety-critical Linux applications. "Building off the work being done by SIL2LinuxMP project and Real-Time Linux project, ELISA will make it easier for companies to build safety-critical systems such as robotic devices, medical devices, smart factories, transportation systems and autonomous driving using Linux. Founding members of ELISA include Arm, BMW Car IT GmbH, KUKA, Linutronix, and Toyota.
To be trusted, safety-critical systems must meet functional safety objectives for the overall safety of the system, including how it responds to actions such as user errors, hardware failures, and environmental changes. Companies must demonstrate that their software meets strict demands for reliability, quality assurance, risk management, development process, and documentation. Because there is no clear method for certifying Linux, it can be difficult for a company to demonstrate that their Linux-based system meets these safety objectives."

The announcement of the 5.0-rc7 kernel
prepatch on February 17 signaled the imminent release of the final 5.0
kernel and the end of this development cycle. 5.0, as it turns out,
brought in fewer changesets than its immediate predecessors, but it was
still a busy cycle with a lot of developers participating. Read on for an
overview of where the work came from in this release cycle.

On his blog, Karim Yaghmour writes about an experimental social network that he and a colleague cobbled together using Git. While it is simply a proof of concept at this point, he is looking for feedback and, perhaps, collaborators to take it further. "It turns out that git has practically everything that's needed to act both as storage and protocol for a social network. Not only that, but it's very well-known within and used, deployed and maintained in the circles I navigate, it scales very well (see github), it's used for critical infrastructure (see kernel.org), it provides history, it's distributed by nature, etc. It's got *almost* everything, but not quite everything needed.
So what's missing from git? A few basic things that it turns out aren't very hard to take care of: ability to 'follow', getting followee notifications, 'commenting' and an interface for viewing feeds. And instead of writing a whole online treatise of how this could be done, I asked my colleague Francois-Denis Gonthier to implement a proof and concept of this that we called 'gitgeist' and just published on github [https://github.com/opersys/gitgeist-poc]."

These days applications are generally moving away from the desktop and
toward the
mobile space. But taking a multi-platform desktop application and adding
two mobile platforms into the mix is difficult to do, as Dirk Hohndel
described in
his linux.conf.au
2019 talk. Hohndel maintains the Subsurface dive log application,
which has
added mobile support over the past few years; he wanted to explain the process
that the project went through to support all of those platforms.
As the subtitle of the talk, "Developing for multiple platforms without
losing your mind", indicates, it is a hard problem to solve sanely.

The digiKam team has announced
the release of digiKam 6.0.0. New features include full support of
video files management working as photos; an integration of all
import/export web-service tools in LightTable, Image editor, and Showfoto;
raw file decoding engine supporting new cameras; similarity data is now
stored in a separate file; simplified web-service authentication using
OAuth protocol; and more.

When patents and free software crop up together, the
usual question is about patent licensing. Patent exhaustion —
the principle that patent rights don't reach past the first
sale of a product — is much
less frequently discussed. At FOSDEM 2019,
US lawyer Van Lindberg argued that several US court
decisions related to exhaustion, most of them recent but some less so,
could come together
to have surprising beneficial effects for free software. He was clear that the
argument applied only in the US but, since court systems tend to
look to each other for consistency's sake, and because Lindberg is an
engaging speaker, the talk was of great interest even in Brussels.

The Debian project has announced the eighth update of Debian 9
"stretch". As a stable point release, this version mainly adds bugfixes for
security issues and other serious problems. Click below for a list of changes.

Regressions are an unavoidable side effect of software development; the
kernel is no different in that regard. The 5.0 kernel introduced a change
in the handling of the "#!" (or "shebang") lines used to indicate
which interpreter should handle an executable text file. The problem has
been duly fixed, but the incident shows how easy it can be to introduce
unexpected problems and highlights some areas where the kernel's
development process does not work as well as we might like.

Version 0.13.0 of the Geary graphical email client is out.
"This is a major new release, featuring a number of new features —
including a new user interface for creating and managing email
accounts, integration with GNOME Online Accounts (which also provides
OAuth login support for some services), improvements in displaying
conversations, composing new messages, interacting with other email
apps, reporting problems as they occur, and number of important bug
fixes, server compatibility fixes, and security fixes."

The Ubuntu team has announced the release of Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS for its
Desktop, Server, and Cloud products, as well as other flavors of Ubuntu
with long-term support. Support periods vary for different flavors.
"Like previous LTS series, 18.04.2 includes hardware enablement stacks
for use on newer hardware. This support is offered on all architectures
and is installed by default when using one of the desktop images."
Ubuntu Server installs the GA kernel, however the HWE kernel may be
selected from the installer bootloader.

Software interrupts (or "softirqs") are one of the oldest
deferred-execution mechanisms in the kernel, and that age shows at times.
Some developers have occasionally been heard to mutter about removing them, but
softirqs are too deeply embedded into how the kernel works to be easily ripped
out; most developers just leave them alone. So the recent per-vector
softirq masking patch set from Frederic Weisbecker is noteworthy as an
exception to that rule. Weisbecker is not getting rid of softirqs, but he
is trying to reduce their impact and improve their latency.

More in Tux Machines

today's leftovers

For those concerned that running Clear Linux means less available packages/bundles than the likes of Debian, Arch Linux, and Fedora with their immense collection of packaged software, Clear has a goal this year of increasing their upstream components available on the distribution by three times.
Intel Fellow Arjan van de Ven provided an update on their bundling state/changes for the distribution. In this update he shared that the Clear Linux team at Intel established a goal this year to have "three times more upstream components in the distro. That's a steep growth, and we want to do that with some basic direction and without reducing quality/etc. We have some folks figuring out what things are the most desired that we lack, so we can add those with most priority... but this is where again we more than welcome feedback."

You might think this annual poll would be fairly similar from year to year, from what distros we list to how people answer, but the results are wildly different from year to year.
(At the time of the creation of each poll, we pull the top 15 distributions according to DistroWatch over the past 12 months.)
Last year, the total votes tallied in at 15,574! And the winner was PCLinuxOS with Ubuntu a close second. Another interesting point is that in 2018, there were 950 votes for "other" and 122 comments compared to this year with only 367 votes for "other" and 69 comments.

Fedora operating system releases are (largely) time-based activity where a new base operating system (kernel, libraries, compilers) is built and tested against our Editions for functionality. This provides a new source for solutions to be built on. The base operating systems may continue to be maintained on the current 13 month life cycle — or services that extend that period may be provided in the future. A solution is never obligated to build against all currently maintained bases.

If you've lived through a major, natural disaster, you know that during the first few days you'll probably have to rely on a mental map, instead of using a smartphone as an extension of your brain. Where's the closest hospital with disaster care? What about shelters? Gas stations? And how many soft story buildings—with their propensity to collapse—will you have to zig-zag around to get there?
Trying to answer these questions after moving back to earthquake-prone San Francisco is why I started the Resiliency Maps project. The idea is to store information about assets, resources, and hazards in a given geographical area in a map that you can download and print out. The project contributes to and is powered by OpenStreetMap (OSM), and the project's entire toolkit is open source, ensuring that the maps will be available to anyone who wants to use them.

Drupal is the third most-widely used CMS behind WordPress and Joomla. With an estimated 3 percent to 4 percent of the world's billion-plus websites, that means Drupal runs tens of millions of sites. Critical flaws in any CMS are popular with hackers, because the vulnerabilities can be unleashed against large numbers of sites with a single, often-easy-to-write script.

Bradley Kuhn works for the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) and part of what that organization does is to think about the problems that software freedom may encounter in the future. SFC worries about what will happen with the four freedoms as things change in the world. One of those changes is already upon us: the Internet of Things (IoT) has become quite popular, but it has many dangers, he said. Copyleft can help; his talk is meant to show how.
It is still an open question in his mind whether the IoT is beneficial or not. But the "deep trouble" that we are in from IoT can be mitigated to some extent by copyleft licenses that are "regularly and fairly enforced". Copyleft is not the solution to all of the problems, all of the time—no idea, no matter how great, can be—but it can help with the dangers of IoT. That is what he hoped to convince attendees with his talk.
A joke that he had seen at least three times at the conference (and certainly before that as well) is that the "S" in IoT stands for security. As everyone knows by now, the IoT is not about security. He pointed to some recent incidents, including IoT baby monitors that were compromised by attackers in order to verbally threaten the parents. This is "scary stuff", he said.

Pat decided to update the Python 3 to version 3.7.2. This update from 3.6 to 3.7 broke binary compatibility and a lot of packages needed to be rebuilt in -current. But you all saw the ChangeLog.txt entry of course.
In my ‘ktown’ repository with Plasma5 packages, the same needed to happen. I have uploaded a set of recompiled packages already, so you can safely upgrade to the latest -current as long as you also upgrade to the latest ‘ktown’. Kudos to Pat for giving me advance warning so I could already start recompiling my own stuff before he uploaded his packages.

The KDE Community has just announced the wider integration of Matrix instant messaging into its communications infrastructure. There are instructions on the KDE Community Wiki as well.
So what’s the state of modern chat with KDE-FreeBSD?
The web client works pretty well in Falkon, the default browser in a KDE Plasma session on FreeBSD. I don’t like leaving browsers open for long periods of time, so I looked at the available desktop clients. Porting Quaternion to FreeBSD was dead simple. No compile warnings, nothing, just an hour of doing some boilerplate-ish things, figuring out which Qt components are needed, and doing a bunch of test builds. So that client is now available from official FreeBSD ports. The GTK-based client Fractal was already ported, so there’s choices available for native-desktop applications over the browser or Electron experience.

If you followed Kdenlive’s activity these last years, you know that we dedicated all our energy into a major code refactoring. During this period, which is not the most exciting since our first goal was to simply restore all the stable version’s features, we were extremely lucky to see new people joining the core team, and investing a lot of time in the project.
We are now considering to release the updated version in April, with KDE Applications 19.04. There are still a few rough edges and missing features (with many new ones added as well), but we think it now reached the point where it is possible to start working with it.

Preliminary Support Allows Linux KVM To Boot Xen HVM Guests

As one of the most interesting patch series sent over by an Oracle developer in quite a while at least on the virtualization front, a "request for comments" series was sent out on Wednesday that would enable the Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) to be able to boot Xen HVM guests.
The 39 patches touching surprisingly just over three thousand lines of code allow for Linux's KVM to run unmodified Xen HVM images as well as development/testing of Xen guests and Xen para-virtualized drivers. This approach is different from other efforts in the past of tighter Xen+KVM integration.

Servers: Kubernetes, SUSE Enterprise Storage and Microsoft/SAP

One of the questions I get asked quite often by people who are just starting or are simply not used to the “new” way things are done in IT is, “What is the cloud?” This, I think, is something you get many different answers to depending on who you ask. I like to think of it this way: The cloud is a grouping of resources (compute, storage, network) that are available to be used in a manner that makes them both highly available and scalable, either up or down, as needed. If I have an issue with a resource, I need to be able to replace that resource quickly — and this is where containers come in. They are lightweight, can be started quickly, and allow us to focus a container on a single job. Containers are also replaceable. If I have a DB container, for instance, there can’t be anything about it that makes it “special” so that when it is replaced, I do not lose operational capability.

As your data needs continue to expand, it’s important to have a storage solution that’s both scalable and easy to manage. That’s particularly true when you’re managing common gateway resources like iSCSI that provide interfaces to storage pools built in Ceph. In this white paper, you’ll see how to use the SUSE Enterprise Storage openATTIC management console to create RADOS block devices (RBDs), pools and iSCSI interfaces for use with Linux, Windows and VMware systems.